a sound reactive audio installation by Andrew Ellis Johnson and David Tinappple

When Pulse Becomes Pitch is an interactive audio installation consisting of a pair of aluminum public address speaker horns. The visitor speaks into a microphone placed in front of and almost swallowed by the bell of the horn.

Taking cues from phonemes, consonants, bilabial fricatives, and glottal stops, the qualities of the visitor’s spoken voice triggers another voice, a foreign tongue resonating from the horn. When the visitor speaks, the other speaks. The relationship is immediately clear.

The question arises, how is this voice also mine? Is this a response, a translation, a reflection?  What am I now saying?  What is the significance of simultaneous translation ignorant of cultural considerations?

The less evident relationship is that of the silences. My silence triggers silence in the other. It is this silent relationship that lingers with the visitor.  After the active vocal coupling is broken the coupling of silence remains, echoes with the visitor.

 "It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds… The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds." -Ivan Illich

This interactive acoustic framework makes urgent the causal relationships between voices. Questions of power, identity, and agency persist even in the most emergent technological context. What is generated when the voice is doubled, cancelled, called back to itself?  Who controls the situation, determines the parameters, maintains the apparatus, defines the sounds, contextualizes meaning.

When Pulse Becomes Pitch: A pulse, a beat, a rhythm becomes a pitch, tone, slant, distance.

Technology:
Speech detection, using real-time FFT based vocal analysis, detects pitch, loudness, brightness and “bark” of the microphone inputs. Phonemes, consonants, bilabial fricatives, glottal stops are all registered. Live input is translated into matched pitch and tempo from a library of pre-recorded and organized sound files.

Venues

2006	When Pulse Becomes Pitch, (with David Tinapple) at Open Space for the Tangible Frequencies installation series presented by Interactive Futures 06, Victoria, British Columbia, January 26-29 http://cfisrv.finearts.uvic.ca/interactivefutures/tinapple.html
2005	When Pulse Becomes Pitch (with David Tinapple), A/V, Rochester, NY, October 13 - November 29 http://www.avspace.org/index.php?show_id=289 (original proposal, later modified)